to be God or not to be God, that is the question...
So I’m studying the hypostatic union in my readings right now. This is a very confrontational subject in my mind and soul. I never realized how little I knew about it until the last few days. I thought I had grasped the basics of it for years, but really I think that I may have grasped the basics of some mild heresies!! That is a hard statement for me to make. I do not think that I believed so wrongly that I didn’t really believe in Christ being God. You all know that I believe. The struggle has been in understanding how Jesus is both true God and true Man. This understanding how is where I misunderstood.
I hope that this is making sense….
So, Jesus is both God and Man. Before time and creation, in eternity, the Logos was with God and was God. The Greek word for “was” denotes eternality, essentialness to being. In other words, if I said that I was a table and it is a true statement, then I would be saying that I had always been a table and never was not a table. John is saying in this simple statement that the Logos is not only with God, but was God. He has never not been God to state it in a negative fashion. That I grasp(as well as a human can grasp it by faith.) I believe this to be an absolutely true statement of faith.
Then, John uses very different language to denote the incarnation. “The Word became flesh.” The word “became” is a Greek word that has the meaning of “to come into being.” To what is the Word coming into being? Flesh. Up until this point, the Word, the Son of God, had not been man. With this, He becomes enfleshed in humanity, human nature. It is a coming into flesh for the Word. Once He was not in flesh, now He is. So here we have the Word becoming Jesus of Nazareth. Note: The man Jesus of Nazareth did not exist before the incarnation; that would say that the Word was in the flesh in heaven, but it is also to say that Jesus of Nazareth does not exist apart from the Word, nor could he for then the Word would not truly be enfleshed. So God becomes man in the form of Jesus, but yet according to John 1:18 the only begotten Son/God(some manuscripts say Son, others say God in this clause) is in the Father’s bosom or heart. So the Word is also still in heaven while He is enfleshed here on Earth.
This last part is the part that I am struggling with. It has to do with a somewhat too literal understanding of Phil. 2:7. This verse speaks of Jesus emptying Himself. Now I have for the most part always been very orthodox in my thinking, but here I fear that I may have strayed a little outside of orthodoxy. I have thought that this emptying was of divine attributes, i.e. omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, but I have been confronted with something that is called the Kennotic theory which says this very thing, but is heretical! So the past few days I have been thinking through these things, wrestling with my thoughts on them and what-not.
I have realized that in my mind I did not disbelieve orthodoxy. I did and do truly believe that Jesus is both God and Man, that His becoming man did not mean that He was not also God, fully God. The way that I expressed it, unfortunately, was in the form of the Kennotic theory. As I have considered this, I realize where I went wrong. Part of it has been a forgetfulness that the attributes of God are essential to His essence. Therefore, God can’t not be omnipotent and still be God. It’s the equivalent of saying that God lied. It can’t be done.
Also, the neat thing that I learned was also that Phil 2:7 says how Jesus emptied Himself. He did so by taking the form of a servant/slave. So Jesus did not count equality with God as something to be seized/exploited/plundered ( as the Greek word originally meant), but emptied Himself by taking the form of a slave. It’s not that He was no longer omnipotent/omnipresent/omniscient in His deity, it’s that He didn’t….and that’s where I lose my wording. It feels like if I complete the sentence it will be too much and be wrong. But if I don’t figure out the end to the sentence then I have left it wide open to whatever one wants to put into it. My teacher put it this way: “Jesus gives up the outward appearance of the insignia of His God-ness, but He does not give up the God-ness that makes Him God.”
So I think that it means that the Word made man did not manifest those things that make Him God in an outward fashion except through His miracles (Dr. Kelly pointed out that it was through Jesus’ deity, not the power of Holy Spirit that He raised Lazarus from the dead by His statement, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Not “The Holy Spirit is the resurrection and the life.” While the Holy Spirit and the Father are all active in everything that the Son does do and did do on Earth, it is by the Son’s divinity that Jesus, the God-man, performs miracles).
It is a divine paradox. Only such a thing couldn’t be made up by man! I hope that this makes some sense. Jesus was both Man and God, dual-natured, but one person. It is mind boggling to think about and awestriking simultaneously (didn’t have to use spell check to spell that right! YES!). The paradox of the Incarnation is spoken well by Augustine (ah-gus-stin by scholars; /ah-gus-steen/ by most of us; /her-ah-tik/ by Pat Robertson(thanks for the wonderful laughs as I continue to contemplate your wit Joe!)):
“He (the Son) departed not from the Father; and came to us. He sucked the breasts, and He contained the world. He lay in the manger, and He fed the Angels. God and Man, the same God who is Man, the same Man who is God, but not God in that wherein He is Man, God, in that He is the Word; Man, that the Word was made Flesh; by at once continuing to be God, and by assuming man’s Flesh; by adding what He was not, not losing what He was. Therefore, henceforward, having now suffered in this His humiliation, dead and buried, He has now risen again, and ascended into heaven, there He is and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; and here He is needy in His poor.”
It’s nice to be confronted with my lack of understanding and to be corrected in the Truth. So now I see that I still need to grow in my understanding of Jesus. I feel like I just made a move in the direction that Dr. Kelly spoke of in the first class. He said (something like this), “I know that we make much of Christ, but I hope that after this class, we can make much more of Him because we understand more deeply the significance of the Incarnation and its ramifications on our lives. Then we can truly make much of this Man who is also God, Jesus Christ!” I think I have taken a step closer to that today.
Grace and Peace are yours in abundance!
I hope that this is making sense….
So, Jesus is both God and Man. Before time and creation, in eternity, the Logos was with God and was God. The Greek word for “was” denotes eternality, essentialness to being. In other words, if I said that I was a table and it is a true statement, then I would be saying that I had always been a table and never was not a table. John is saying in this simple statement that the Logos is not only with God, but was God. He has never not been God to state it in a negative fashion. That I grasp(as well as a human can grasp it by faith.) I believe this to be an absolutely true statement of faith.
Then, John uses very different language to denote the incarnation. “The Word became flesh.” The word “became” is a Greek word that has the meaning of “to come into being.” To what is the Word coming into being? Flesh. Up until this point, the Word, the Son of God, had not been man. With this, He becomes enfleshed in humanity, human nature. It is a coming into flesh for the Word. Once He was not in flesh, now He is. So here we have the Word becoming Jesus of Nazareth. Note: The man Jesus of Nazareth did not exist before the incarnation; that would say that the Word was in the flesh in heaven, but it is also to say that Jesus of Nazareth does not exist apart from the Word, nor could he for then the Word would not truly be enfleshed. So God becomes man in the form of Jesus, but yet according to John 1:18 the only begotten Son/God(some manuscripts say Son, others say God in this clause) is in the Father’s bosom or heart. So the Word is also still in heaven while He is enfleshed here on Earth.
This last part is the part that I am struggling with. It has to do with a somewhat too literal understanding of Phil. 2:7. This verse speaks of Jesus emptying Himself. Now I have for the most part always been very orthodox in my thinking, but here I fear that I may have strayed a little outside of orthodoxy. I have thought that this emptying was of divine attributes, i.e. omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, but I have been confronted with something that is called the Kennotic theory which says this very thing, but is heretical! So the past few days I have been thinking through these things, wrestling with my thoughts on them and what-not.
I have realized that in my mind I did not disbelieve orthodoxy. I did and do truly believe that Jesus is both God and Man, that His becoming man did not mean that He was not also God, fully God. The way that I expressed it, unfortunately, was in the form of the Kennotic theory. As I have considered this, I realize where I went wrong. Part of it has been a forgetfulness that the attributes of God are essential to His essence. Therefore, God can’t not be omnipotent and still be God. It’s the equivalent of saying that God lied. It can’t be done.
Also, the neat thing that I learned was also that Phil 2:7 says how Jesus emptied Himself. He did so by taking the form of a servant/slave. So Jesus did not count equality with God as something to be seized/exploited/plundered ( as the Greek word originally meant), but emptied Himself by taking the form of a slave. It’s not that He was no longer omnipotent/omnipresent/omniscient in His deity, it’s that He didn’t….and that’s where I lose my wording. It feels like if I complete the sentence it will be too much and be wrong. But if I don’t figure out the end to the sentence then I have left it wide open to whatever one wants to put into it. My teacher put it this way: “Jesus gives up the outward appearance of the insignia of His God-ness, but He does not give up the God-ness that makes Him God.”
So I think that it means that the Word made man did not manifest those things that make Him God in an outward fashion except through His miracles (Dr. Kelly pointed out that it was through Jesus’ deity, not the power of Holy Spirit that He raised Lazarus from the dead by His statement, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Not “The Holy Spirit is the resurrection and the life.” While the Holy Spirit and the Father are all active in everything that the Son does do and did do on Earth, it is by the Son’s divinity that Jesus, the God-man, performs miracles).
It is a divine paradox. Only such a thing couldn’t be made up by man! I hope that this makes some sense. Jesus was both Man and God, dual-natured, but one person. It is mind boggling to think about and awestriking simultaneously (didn’t have to use spell check to spell that right! YES!). The paradox of the Incarnation is spoken well by Augustine (ah-gus-stin by scholars; /ah-gus-steen/ by most of us; /her-ah-tik/ by Pat Robertson(thanks for the wonderful laughs as I continue to contemplate your wit Joe!)):
“He (the Son) departed not from the Father; and came to us. He sucked the breasts, and He contained the world. He lay in the manger, and He fed the Angels. God and Man, the same God who is Man, the same Man who is God, but not God in that wherein He is Man, God, in that He is the Word; Man, that the Word was made Flesh; by at once continuing to be God, and by assuming man’s Flesh; by adding what He was not, not losing what He was. Therefore, henceforward, having now suffered in this His humiliation, dead and buried, He has now risen again, and ascended into heaven, there He is and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; and here He is needy in His poor.”
It’s nice to be confronted with my lack of understanding and to be corrected in the Truth. So now I see that I still need to grow in my understanding of Jesus. I feel like I just made a move in the direction that Dr. Kelly spoke of in the first class. He said (something like this), “I know that we make much of Christ, but I hope that after this class, we can make much more of Him because we understand more deeply the significance of the Incarnation and its ramifications on our lives. Then we can truly make much of this Man who is also God, Jesus Christ!” I think I have taken a step closer to that today.
Grace and Peace are yours in abundance!